A Summer Affair (19 page)

Passed Hors d’Oeuvres

Coconut shrimp, curried mango chutney

Chilled gazpacho “shots”

Smoked chicken and avocado quesadillas with corn salsa

Wild mushroom and Roquefort in phyllo

Gougères

Crispy fried pork wontons with sweet-and-sour apricot dipping sauce

Stationary Hors d’Oeuvres

Raw bar with freshly shucked oysters and clams, mignonette sauce

Jumbo shrimp with horseradish, mustard, and cocktail sauces

Brie
en croûte
with pecans and plum chutney

Chilled vegetable crudités with chive and pine nut dip and roasted red pepper hummus

Seated Dinner

Grilled beef tenderloin with Gorgonzola cream

Mini lobster roll

Wild rice salad with portobello mushrooms and dried cranberry vinaigrette

Traditional Caprese salad: Sliced Bartlett Farm tomatoes, buffalo mozzarella, fresh basil

Corn bread with honey butter

Dessert Sampler

Brownies and blondies, chocolate-dipped strawberries, éclairs, Key lime bars, homemade marshmallows, brown sugar fudge, peanut brittle, chocolate mint truffles

Business Briefs,
The Inquirer and Mirror
, February 25

Lockhart Dixon, executive director of Nantucket’s Children, confirmed yesterday that rock-and-roll icon Max West will perform at the charity’s annual Summer Gala, to be held on August 16 at the Town Recreational Fields.

“We’re thrilled with this opportunity,” Dixon said. “Max West has agreed to donate the performance; otherwise we would never have been able to afford such an esteemed name. Our gala cochair, Claire Danner Crispin, is a childhood friend of Max West’s. She was able to get him to commit, and we are very grateful.”

Tickets to the event start at $1,000 per person and include cocktails, dinner, and a 90-minute concert by West.

“It’s sure to be the social event of the summer,” Dixon said.

G
avin Andrews was stealing from Nantucket’s Children, though he didn’t think of it as
stealing
per se, nor did he think of it as
embezzling.
Rather, the image that came to his mind was that of skimming off the top, as harmless as a child putting his finger through the icing on a cake.

He had started “skimming” back in October, when donations rolled in for the annual appeal. He would get ten or twelve checks, totaling eighty-five hundred dollars, and he would deposit eight thousand, taking five hundred in cash in his pocket. The check amounts were recorded in a file on the computer, but the deposits were made at the bank, and the only record of them was the deposit slip (which Gavin threw away) and the bank statements, which it was Gavin’s responsibility to reconcile. His skimming would be caught eventually, by an auditor, but the auditor only came once every two years and he had come in September and had found everything on the up-and-up, in perfect order, balanced to the penny. Lock was pleased with Gavin, said he expected nothing less, patted him, literally, on the back. Two weeks later, Gavin started the skimming. By the time the auditor returned, Gavin would be long gone.

No one else would catch him. The board of directors did have a treasurer, an elderly man named—you had to love this—Ben Franklin, who lived in Lincoln Park in Chicago, not far from Gavin’s parents. In fact, Ben Franklin and Gavin’s father, Gavin senior, belonged to the same social club, and it was for this reason that Gavin knew Ben Franklin was, in his waning years, losing it. Mr. Franklin was the only board member who had volunteered to be treasurer. He was the father of nine children and the grand-father of twenty-six, and Gavin believed he desired to be treasurer less to manage the finances than to escape the chaos of his summer household. Old Ben expected Gavin to hand him the budget and investment balance in the minutes before each board meeting. Ben Franklin came to only three meetings a year—June, July, and August—and the rest of the time, Gavin sat in as treasurer and presented the budget himself.

Lock was the only person Gavin had to worry about, but Gavin had worked at Nantucket’s Children for nearly as long as Lock had, and Gavin knew his boss as intimately as a spouse. (This might have been presumptuous on Gavin’s part. What, after all, did he know about having a spouse? So let’s say this: Gavin spent more time with Lock than Daphne did.) Gavin knew the following things: Although Lock was a businessman, his predilections ran toward interacting with people and building relationships. He could schmooze, he could negotiate with such a deft touch that the other party did not realize he was doing Lock’s exact bidding. Lock was persuasive and confident and smart, and that was how he had built his fortune. Lock was not, however, a numbers man. Looking at rows and columns of figures made his head swim and his eyes cross until he begged Gavin to bring him an Advil. Gavin learned this early on and kindly suggested that Lock leave the annoying minutiae of the banking to him. Lock was grateful, and Gavin had spent years earning his confidence. The books were perfect, the auditor pleased. Gold star.

Gavin’s decision to steal, embezzle, skim, did not come lightly. Even though his path was clear and his plan foolproof, he was still terrified of getting caught. Getting caught would pretty much end the life he now led—meaning his job and the use of his parents’ enormous house, not to mention his relationship with his parents, with Lock, and with everyone else he knew. So why do it? To be blunt: Gavin felt somebody somewhere owed him something. His life had not worked out the way it was supposed to. He had been born the only child of wealthy parents; his life should have been easy. One of his problems was that he had peaked too early. He had been voted Best Looking by his graduating class at Evanston Day School, but his parents had not been impressed by that distinction; they had seen it as one more thing they had given him. (
You were born with very good genes,
his mother said
.
) Gavin then attended the University of Michigan, where he nearly got lost; it was impossible to stand out in the sea of blue and maize that populated Ann Arbor. Gavin would never forget his first football game in the Big House, gazing at all those other bodies and feeling his insignificance, as some people did when contemplating the infinite number of stars in the heavens. The defining moment of college came when Gavin was having sex with a beautiful freshman named Diana Prell in the broom closet of an Irish pub. He couldn’t remember how they had ended up in the broom closet, but he remembered that it had been Diana’s idea, that she had led him in there. When the sex was over, however, she accused him of having forced himself on her. She did not go so far as to press charges, but the term “date rape” was silently attached to his name. He pretty much lost the few friends he had, but he kept going to parties, anyway, and took up smoking so that he would have something to do, a group of people to bond with, if only for bumming a cigarette or a light. His resentment and alienation grew; he felt something underneath his surface starting to rot.

After college, Gavin senior set up a job for Gavin at Kapp and Lehigh, an accounting firm in Chicago, and it was there that his life of white-collar crime began. He succumbed to what he now saw was classic peer pressure when he was approached by a group of second-year hires who had an embezzlement ring going. He could have blown the whistle, or he could have turned a blind eye, but he so desperately wanted acceptance by this group that he performed the most dangerous of the jobs—moving funds from one account to another and changing the amounts in the switch, then placing the difference in a slush fund that everyone in on the scam split. They got caught after only a few months, not because of Gavin, but because of another fellow, who fingered everyone in the ring. Because they were all recent hires, very young, and incredibly stupid, and because the amount embezzled was less than ten thousand dollars, Kapp and Lehigh fired them but did not, mercifully, press charges.

Still, Gavin was left in a state of disgrace, and he was unhirable. His parents were at their wits’ end. Gavin lived at home that winter, jobless, listening to mournful jazz and spending his parents’ money on finely tailored clothes that, as far as he could tell, he would never again have a reason to wear. In the summer, he trailed his parents to Nantucket, and in the fall they suggested he stay and try to make his own way. Either Gavin’s parents thought the sea air and cold, gray winter would be fortifying for his character, or they simply wanted him banished, tucked away on an island where they didn’t have to deal with him in the day-to-day. Gavin was allowed to live in the house overlooking Cisco Beach for free, but he had to find a job and pay for the utilities.

Nantucket was a small place, and this suited Gavin, but he had a hard time finding a way to distinguish himself. He babysat paintings in an art gallery for a few months but found it too boring; he waited tables at the Brotherhood but found it too messy and hot. Then he found Nantucket’s Children, and something clicked. (This was odd, his parents thought, because he disliked children.) His skill set, as it turned out, was exactly that of a fastidious administrator. He was prompt, he was neat, he was impeccably polite, and he never forgot a thing. He built himself a persona—the tiny red ladybug of a car, his penchant for classical music and foreign films and Italian shirts from the Haberdashery—but lately he had begun to feel hemmed in by his own identity. He wanted friends instead of acquaintances, he wanted to be invited out to see a band and drink beer at the Chicken Box, he wanted to be talked to instead of wondered about. His closest friends now were Rosemary Pinkle, a recently widowed woman he knew from the Episcopal church, and Lock’s wife, Daphne Dixon, who liked to gossip as much as he did.

He was stealing, not because he needed the money (though the utility bills for a six-thousand-square-foot house weren’t cheap, and his raises at work never garnered him as much butter as he hoped), but because he wanted a change. He would stockpile the cash and save it for his escape. When the time was right, he would flee the country—for Thailand or Vietnam or Laos, where he would find a beautiful girl and live freely, without judgment.

Here was one thing that surprised Gavin about the stealing: it enhanced the quality of his day-to-day life. He went from floating mindlessly through the thousand and one tasks of his day, to sitting on the edge of his seat, noticing everything, taking nothing for granted. He was aware of the five hundred-dollar bills in his pocket; he was aware of the crumpled deposit slip buried in the trash can; he could feel the pressure of his fingertips against the computer keyboard as he typed in the deposit amount. He could feel the sharp zing of the air against his clean-shaven cheek; he could hear Lock, across the room, drawing and expelling breath; he could pick apart each individual note of the Chopin polonaise that was playing on the Bose radio. Which note would be playing at the moment he was discovered? It gave him a chill to wonder.

The phone rang and Gavin nearly jumped out of his rolling office chair. Lock looked up.

“Too much caffeine at lunch?”

“Double latte,” Gavin confirmed.

“If it’s Daphne, tell her I’m out,” Lock said.

Gavin nodded. This was a standard request. Although Gavin regarded Daphne as a comrade in the quest to keep life interesting, he did not tell her that her husband routinely refused her calls.

“Nantucket’s Children.”

“Gavin?”

Gavin licked his teeth and stared straight ahead at the freestanding coatrack—like a prop straight out of
Dragnet
—draped with Lock’s Burberry overcoat and Gavin’s (nicer) cashmere jacket from Hickey Freeman. It was Claire Crispin . . . again.

“Hello, Claire.”

“Hi. Is Lock handy?”

Handy. She always said this—maybe because her husband was a carpenter—and the phrase drove Gavin apeshit. Was Lock handy? No, he wasn’t handy; he couldn’t even change the toilet paper roll in the bathroom. (Gavin had used that joke once, then wearied of it.) He had wearied of Claire in general and yet she was always around, calling Lock, popping in. She would stop by at eight fifteen on her way back from dropping the kids off at school, looking like death on a stick in her stretched-out, shapeless yoga clothes, wearing no makeup, her hair in a haphazard bun. Gavin would never be seen looking that way in public; he didn’t like to look that way in private. Claire always had something to pick up or drop off or something she wanted Gavin to pull from the files, or she wanted Lock’s ear on a conflict she had had via e-mail with Isabelle French. It was so tiresome, Gavin didn’t pay close attention. More often than not, Claire would call later that day, and when Gavin answered the phone, she would say, “Hi, it’s Claire. Did you miss me?”

And Gavin would think:
How can I miss you when you won’t go away?

He usually tried to muster a little chuckle, and then Claire would say (wearing his patience down to a frayed thread):
Is Lock handy?

Now Gavin said, “Please hold.” He pushed the button on the phone and said to Lock, “It’s Claire.”

“Okay,” Lock said. “Great. Put her through.”

Lock did not take Daphne’s calls, but he always took Claire’s. What did that say? Gavin watched Lock closely. His eyes did seem to brighten when he said hello, and his voice seemed to take on a tender tone, and then Lock swiveled in his chair and faced the twenty-paned window, which put his back to Gavin. It was a gesture Gavin knew well, in many incarnations: Gavin kept his hands in his jacket pockets when he went to the bank with a deposit, and he did all of the banking computer work with the screen tilted away from Lock’s desk, most often when Lock was at lunch. These were the ways of a person with a secret. Turn your back. Speak in short, innocuous phrases that give nothing away, as Lock was now doing:
Yes, I see what you mean. Okay. Not right now. You bet. Yep, me too.